JAMA has an article on the history of continuing medical education (CME). Annoyingly, they did not make it one of the open-access articles, so they don’t get a link. However, there are some telling excerpts and some good commentary over at The Carlat Psychiatry Blog. There was a time when families used to sit, all…

Black Box Voting has sent out emails, suggesting that technologically-astute persons consider signing up for temporary tech support jobs, to provide support for the election process. Oddly, the message is not on the front page of their website, but someone else already posted it. Sounds like a good idea, if you have the time.…

There have been many collections and compendia of artistic works by persons with psychiatric illness. They are interesting. In fact, it was a chance encounter with such a book that first got me interested in psychology. Thre is a story there, which I won’t tell here, other than to say that it is a good…

Republicans see that they are losing on this issue, so they just make the issue go away: U.S., Iraqi Negotiators Agree on 2011 Withdrawal Withdrawal from Iaq is one of Obama’s stronger points. So it is a smart move for the Administration to just make it into a non-issue. Ok, whatever, just stop the illegal…

Just in case you thought you were having a good day, here is a graph from the Fed that shows how much money the banks have: Don’t panic. The final number is from 1 July 2008. I’m sure they’ve fixed the problem by now. HT: London Banker, on Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor (RGE Monitor).

In the late ’60’s – early ’70’s, is was commonplace for bands to write songs that were utterly meaningless, then pass them off as great works of art. The products of pure genius. I head one such song on the way home from work: A Horse With No Name, by America, released in 1972.…

Huntington’s Disease is a serious, progressive disease that involves degeneration of part of the brain. In particular, there is loss of neurons and development of gliosis in the striatum. The disease is named after George Huntington, who described it in 1872. Huntington’s Disease can be diagnosed by genetic testing. There has been a lot of…

This seems very odd. The Internet — including web sites and email — has been found to have a very serious security flaw. Civilized places such as Sweden and Puerto Rico are already fixing the problem. There are plans to improve security for US .gov and .mil sites (government and military , respectively). Yet, the…